The Heavens are high, and the emperor is far away. We have been abandoned.
—Unknown, letters from the Heavenly Capital, era of the Last Kingdom, Cycle 1424
Lan sensed it the moment Hóng’yì struck with the Art of the Mind. She watched Zen recoil and his qì flicker out. His eyes snapped shut and his expression went taut, no doubt with whatever horrifying memory Hóng’yì had unleashed in his mind.
Her hands tightened against Tai, who lay nearly lifeless in her arms. His skin was clammy and cold, his face drained of color, but his chest rose and fell in shallow breaths.
An idea had come to her as she’d watched Zen and Hóng’yì spar. Despite the imperial heir’s insouciance, there were brief moments when his smile slipped and an ugly expression twisted his mouth. He was expending more effort on this battle than he let on—and if he was so completely focused on defeating Zen, then he might not be so well guarded against other attacks.
This could be her chance.
Lan closed her eyes and pushed her senses beyond the Protective Seal that hovered over them. She combed through theflow of qì on the battlefield. Finding the qì of Hóng’yì’s mind, thoughts, and emotions would be akin to finding a single thread in a grand tapestry. She cleaved past the tidal waves of cold, dark demonic energies from the Black Tortoise and felt the landscape shift into the heat and blinding light of the Crimson Phoenix’s power.
Andthere…at last, she found the strand of Hóng’yì’s twisted delight and triumph as he bore down upon Zen’s mind, luxuriating in the cruelest and most terrible memories.
He was so distracted that he did not notice as Lan slipped inside his mind.
The scene shifted. The battlefield fell away as the streams of Hóng’yì’s thoughts surged past her in pieces, memories like shards of a broken looking glass: a man swathed in gold bending over a cot where an infant cried, the shadow of fiery wings lighting the chamber; a toddler tugging at a set of heavy doors, wailing for his mother; a child seated upon a high chair with an entire hallway of servants kneeling before him….
And there it was, the memory of the yellow rosewood doors with the engraving of the Crimson Phoenix.
Lan directed her qì toward it and fell into the memory. The doors opened without a sound.
She was in a grand chamber within the Imperial Palace in all its glory, ceilings painted with gold and cinnabar and lapis lazuli, walls encrusted with jade and other precious stones. In the midst of it was a boy.
Hóng’yì was older now than in the other memories, perhaps eleven or twelve, on the cusp of adolescence. He was dressed in a hàn’fú of pale green silk, the color reserved for imperial princes and heirs of the emperor. He crouched over something, and it was only when he drew back, shoulders shaking with sobs, that Lan realized what it was.
Lan had never seen the Luminous Dragon Emperor,Shuò’lóng, the last emperor of the Last Kingdom, except in paintings. In all those, he’d had the look of someone born to power and riches, with the entire world in the palm of his hand. His hair had been as black as a pot of ink, his skin as unnaturally smooth as white jade. Less like a man and more like a god.
The man lying on the kàng bed swathed in golds and samites embroidered with the emblems of the Four Demon Gods looked more like a corpse than a living human. His skin clung to the bone, and he was frightfully pale, as though death had already cast its claws into him. Only his eyes, jutting out from his hollowed cheeks, showed a flicker of life as he looked at his son.
Those eyes were red, burning, bleeding.
“Fù’wáng? King Father?”Lan was startled by how young and vulnerable Hóng’yì’s voice sounded. The boy shook his father by the shoulders.“Please, get up, fù’wáng! Our capital city is under attack!”
“I am not your fù’wáng.”The voice that spoke through the emperor’s mouth belonged to a thing older than time, to one that owned a thousand, ten thousand voices. Each word reverberated with power, with a terrifying thrum of qì that threatened to tear the walls down.“I am the being behind the throne. I am the one whose power he feeds off of like a puny river leech.”
Shock rippled through Lan. It was just as she’d suspected: the Crimson Phoenix had controlled—at least, in part—the emperors of the Last Kingdom.
Hóng’yì’s face was pale, his pupils wide with fear.“The Crimson Phoenix,”he whispered, and then he lunged for a familiar porcelain jar by his father’s bedside.“Fù’wáng,”he gasped, holding out the jar, within which rested a Seed of Clarity.“You have not taken your medicine—”
He broke off. The Demon God was laughing through the emperor’s lips, a distorted, hissing sound that broke off in a burble of blood.
“Your foul little trick seeds can no longer help him,” the Phoenix said.“Your fù’wáng’s body and mind are already failing of their own accord. The end is nigh for him. He no longer has the strength to suppress my power, even with your golden seeds.”
Hóng’yì stared at the thing that was not his father for a breath, as though at a loss for words. And then his expression twisted.“You are my family’s legacy! You serve us, and you serve our kingdom. I command you to take down those foreign invaders!”His voice shook slightly as he spoke, but Lan recognized the steel-eyed glint of someone who had never been denied, who had never known fear or failure. Of someone who had never known the taste of powerlessness.
“My power is constrained by this physical body and its ailing mind and soul, all of which have burned like a candle to the end of their wick. I am your family’s legacy…and perhaps it is time for the legacy to pass on.”A gleam of hunger shone on the emperor’s face as it beheld Hóng’yì.“Bind me. Together, there are no limits to what we could achieve. I sense within you power greater than that of any of your ancestors. Bind me, and we could take the skies and conquer the ends of this world and the next.”
The Hóng’yì in the memory glanced behind him at some disturbance Lan couldn’t see. The Elantians closing in, perhaps. When he turned back to the Demon God that spoke through his father, the naked fear in his gaze had shifted to greed.
“I cannot,”he said.“I cannot make you a bargain while you are bound to another.”
The emperor—the Demon God controlling him—gave a slow blink. His eyes burned. Then he said,“It is possible.”
Three little words that cracked Lan’s world.
“The bargain may be ended and the binder’s soul released,”the Phoenix continued,“so long as it is a mutual agreement.”
